AaronS

you drank wrong

came here to post about a bad meal I had recently but don’t really want to argue with sneak.

their sister restaurant jacob’s pickles is probably the best beer bar I’ve found on the UWS.

to øl mine is bigger than yours barley wine-style ale - brewed at de proef, 12.5% abv. de proef is a belgian brewery that used to make beer for mikkeller, to øl, and omnipollo, among others, that made my the beer I liked best for a long time. their beer hasn’t been available in nyc for a long time, both good and bad reasons, and while this isn’t really that old it is the last of my stash and so on. I had a bunch of these that I planned to hold onto for a while, but these aren’t holding up as well as I thought they’d be despite their high abv. (sierra and jw lees beers that are older than this taste better when stored the same way.) maybe I should have held on to these longer, while the malt flavors are falling apart there’s some nice dried fruit followed by marmalade, grapefruit, vanilla, and pine, along with some malt sweetness underneath. this isn’t as bad as I thought it was at first, and so on.

I have a meal or two in durham. we’ll have a car. bbq? something else?

an acquaintance of mine, who was charged with running a ponzi scheme that defrauded his investors of nine figures, has another finance job.

I got a next day reservation for the game menu at the beginning of the month.

there’s some nice writing about the brontës in howe’s my emily dickinson that I’m sure wilfred would enjoy.

how do you cheat?

omnipollo x närke kulturbryggeri tärt-kaggen! barrel aged imperial porter with heather honey, coconut & muscavado sugar a pastry version of ”kaggen”. the legends at närke kulturbryggeri came to the church to help us make a beautiful heather honey imperial porter. after extended maturation on steel we transferred this dark beer into select bourbon barrels and gave it a respectful yet customary omnipollo® cake treatment. enthusiastically crafted at our church brewery in sundbyberg, sweden. - brewed at omnipollo, 13% abv. this is a lot simpler than the two beers above it - there's a big honeyed note that gives way to some bourbon and toasted coconut, which is followed by even more sweetness. meh.

omnipollo church lumberjack double barrel aged imperial maple coffee stout this breakfast in a glass is a big morning treat with our bff cory (3 sons). half of it was aged for 12 months in a freshly emptied heaven hill bourbon barrel, then transferred and aged a second time for 24 months in a single buffalo trace rye barrel. the other half aged for 9 months in a willet family estate bourbon barrel before being transferred and aged again for 18 months in a phantom spirits rum barrel. - brewed at omnipollo’s own brewery in stockholm, 14% abv. this one came out in october of last year and is just as smooth as last nights beer, which was considerably cheaper. omnipollo is or was at the forefront of most of the trends in american brewing over the last ten or so years, as I said as naseum on the old site, but for better or worse (probably almost all for the better) I haven’t kept up with pastry stouts the way I have with ipas, but this seems better than the american examples of the style the same way omnipollo’s beers so often do. like last nights beer this has a deceptively simple flavor profile at first, there’s a mixture of bourbon and coffee that has real depth to it and very little apparent alcohol in a way that’s pretty surprising given the abv. this starts out with a big set of bourbon and other liquor flavors that give way to big vanilla notes that have some maple and coffee underneath along with a small amount of booze and rum. there’s all kinds of other stuff too, oak, fudge, floral coffee, raisin, rye, and so on. this is very easy to drink, much less flawed than most 14% beers, well put together, blah blah blah. recommended.

omnipollo x angry chair x side project x 3 sons x horus x phase three x private press three times three vol.3 imperial stout with milk sugar, coconut & coconut candy (with soy) - 12% abc, brewed at the church brewery on sturegatan 41 in stundbyberg, sweden. three by three is a series of beers that omnipollo makes with a set of old and new collaborators, and while I've heard of the old ones none of the breweries involved in this beer really distribute to nyc anymore. this is the first omnipollo beer I've seen in a store in a really long time, which is a mixed blessing I guess. it's a shame that it's harder for me to keep up with what their doing, their stuff has been cutting edge for so long and is almost always terrific, but at the same time this (and the others that I know where to buy at the moment) was expensive enough that I didn't notice it wasn't barrel aged until I started coping the copy on the can into the site. this is a pastry stout, obviously, and is jet black with almost no head. there's no date on this can but this tastes like it's kinda old, there's a big set of roasted malt with some coconut and fudge underneath. this is simple but pretty well put together - the coconut flavor is well done and works with the beer flavors, the mouthfeel is good, there's some lactose in the finish, there's almost no apparent alcohol, and so on. recommended at a lower price.

so sorry voyager. my condolences.

Any recommendations in San Juan or elsewhere? I've emailed La Casita Blanca based on my neighbor's recommendation and done some googling.

more first hand reports from red hook: my attempt to walk into the red hook tavern for lunch last week was met with laughter, I ended up at hometown bbq where the brisket and pulled pork were excellent and the sides were truly terrible.

I love old stock ale - I remember feeling indulgent when I paid $65 for a case of it I special ordered circa 2003. it's not sold here and I've been unable to special order a few times over the years. did you buy that new? I would think that would get steadily better over the next ten or twenty years. 3 floyd's brewing trolls trolls trolls barrel aged imperial stoūt with vanilla beans added - 13% abv. 3 floyds is one of those brands that I often buy for nostalgic reasons, but the barrel aged stuff is almost always a pretty reasonable purchase and this is one of the good ones. it spent a year in unspecified bourbon barrels and starts out with a typical set of roast malt and bourbon flavors that turn into sweet vanilla and some booze. the vanilla notes are really well done and are the kind of adjunct that makes sense - that's a flavor that's already present in bourbon blah blah blah. this isn't as good as crushing mass, their barrel aged coffee stout, but it's relatively simple in an appealing way and even tastes like beer.

his current series of novels is insipid. he’s only good when he’s writing about himself.

the norseman looks a lot better.

sneak was the reason I joined this site - something about how easy it was to get people to fuck you if you took them to perry street made me sign up in 2007 or whenever it was. it had everything I liked about his posting - it was funny, a little overly personal, and you I could tell whether or not I'd want to eat there. about a year later I found out I had sat next to him at the general greene and decided I'd introduce myself the next time I saw him, which would be soon given how many places we were both frequenting at the time. that didn't happen until a sit down meal at the original fox face location, where I didn't say hi because he was on a date. I did finally talk to him in person on the street in prospect heights a few years ago. more importantly I'm one of the many who really enjoyed his posts here over the years. I hope he knew how much I enjoyed interacting with him here.

3 floyds’ calumet queen kölsch style ale - 5% abv. this is a pretty pleasant version of the basic beer flavors - bready pilsner malt, lemon, noble hop spice, and a fair amount of sweetness. this is a pretty hoppy take on the style, there’s some melon and green apple in the finish along with some malt notes I don’t love. this isn’t prefect, but it’s very good for the price and reminds me of how much I like their beer when it’s fresh.

my meal at el bulli was a lot better than any of my meals at per se.

oxbow brewing company noel dark farmhouse ale - 9.5% abv. the only information I can find about this on line is that this was made with wheat and took eleven months to make. it's dark brown, has a big set of booze and odd yeast flavors with some dried fruit underneath. the mixture of saison yeast and brett is pleasant enough, but none of this really works together and the apparent alcohol really mars the fruit. I thought this would be better.

I ate there after moma a few weeks ago. it was pleasant.

maine beer company wolfe's neck india pale ale - 6.2% abv. I think of this as one of the newer maine beers but apparently this goes back to 2016. this one's got simcoe, mosaic, columbus, and idaho 7. maine almost always uses established hops with something new, which is definitely how this tastes. there's a pretty soft version of the berry and grapefruit thing you'd get with mosaic and older hops with a little bit of tropical fruit and bubble tea underneath and some grassy lemon in the finish. this is a lot closer to a north east ipa than I remember it, has all the hallmarks of maine's beer - clean flavors, quaffable, expensive, balanced, etc etc. I don't see this one around as much as most of their other beers and I like this a lot more than the bottles of lunch I had over the holiday. strongly recommended.

firestone walker wookey jack black rye ipa - 8.2% abv. this is yet another one from the good old days. this one goes back to 2014 and uses citra and amarillo hops, which is what was in union jack at the time if memory serves. that’s changed a lot over the years, but this is the way I remember it, which is always nice. there’s a pretty spicy set of roast malt notes that definitely tastes like rye that’s followed by some fairly bitter herbal hop notes that start out with mint and give way a pleasant version of the citrus and and tropical stuff that you associate with citra. this is really pretty well made - it’s really clean, has well done, well defined flavors, the combination of malt and hops is fairly sophisticated, and so on. this is a lot like the maine beer company stuff, which is the highest praise I can give this kind of beer, but at a much lower price point. it really bothers me that their beer is so hard to find reasonably fresh around here blah blah blah. this showed up in nyc about three weeks ago and still tastes great even though it was canned in early october.